Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a flexible touch screen panel and a method of manufacturing the same, and, more particularly, to a flexible touch screen panel capable of being bent or folded and a method of manufacturing the same.
Description of the Related Art
A touch screen panel is an image display device that gives a user the ability to select from content displayed on the screen of the device using a human hand or an object to input the command of the user.
Accordingly, the touch screen panel is provided on the front face of the image display device to convert a contact position of the human hand or the object into an electrical signal. The content selected by the contact position is received as an input signal.
Since the touch screen panel may replace an additional input device that would otherwise be coupled to the image display device, such as a keyboard and a mouse, touch screens are gradually growing in popularity.
Methods of realizing a touch screen panel include a resistance layer method, a photo-sensing method, and an electro-capacitive method. Among the above methods, the widely used electro-capacitive touch screen panel senses a change in capacitance formed in a conductive sensing cell with another peripheral sensing cell or a ground electrode when the human hand or the object such as a stylus pen contacts the touch screen panel to convert the contact position into the electrical signal.
The electro-capacitive touch screen panel is commonly attached to the external surface of an image display device, such as one of a liquid crystal display (LCD) and an organic light emitting display (OLED). Therefore, the touch screen panel requires high transparency and a thin film characteristic.
In addition, recently, development of a flexible image display device having a flexible touch screen panel attached onto a flexible image display has been underway.
The conventional touch screen panel includes sensing cells formed on a glass substrate of a transparent conductive material such as indium tin oxide (ITO) and is not flexible.
In order to apply the conventional touch screen panel concept to the flexible image display device, a method of using a flexible thin film such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as the substrate of the touch screen panel is suggested. However, when the thin film is used as the substrate of the touch screen panel and the ultimate deformation ratio is small, the touch screen panel has limited flexibility in that it cannot be bended or folded and is therefore of limited use.